Description Of Pepper Spray's Components And Possible Harms
Pepper spray first came into use in Japan, but was not mass produced until the 1980s. It drew criticism for being a "new toy" that should have been classified as an incendiary weapon. The first spray patents were filed by John Pemberton in 1884 and Paul Curry in 1887. The first commercialization of the product occurred on October 5, 1989 when Japanese businessmen Shosei Takayama and Ikuo Kobayashi patented their design for his spray. Tear gas and pepper spray were used extensively by the South Korean police in crowd control and riot control. The US military has also used this spray and tear gas for crowd and prisoner control and non-lethal weapons to quell prison riots. In the mid-1990s, Dr. John K. Gaunyse, a security expert from the US Department of Energy, developed a method to formulate airborne spray by atomizing the petroleum-based capsicum solution. In the late 1990s, the FBI opened an investigation into allegations that there were serious safety and health prob...